Universität Mannheim
Anglistisches Seminar
Realism and Experiment in in the 1980s: Banville, Ishiguro and Swift
Folkert Degenring
Sommersemester 2006

The Aspect of Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills

Term Paper

by

Lydia Gaukler

4. Semester 

Content  I

1. Introduction  1

2. The Plot of the Novel  2

3. Etsuko’s failure as a mother  5

4. The Unreliability of the Narrator  8

5. The Function of Memory in the Novel  11

6. Conclusion  15

Literature  17

“I’m interested in memory because it’s a filter through which we see our lives, and because it’s foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happended than in what actually happended.”¹ 

(Kazuo Ishiguro)

“Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here.” 

(Etsuko)

1. Introduction

It is widely accepted that human memory constitutes identity: We need to have individual memories in order to experience biographical continuity. Without the episodic (or autobiographical) memory, it would be impossible for us to link our individual past to ourselves.² The strong connexion between memory and identity is a very prominent topic in contemporary British fiction³ and the significance of memory is discussed in many literary works. One of this books is Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel A Pale View of Hills.

In this novel, Kazuo Ishiguro concerns himself with memories and their problematic function in the process of forming one’s identity.⁴ All of his novels he has published so far deal with “individuals scanning their past for clues to their identity, loss, or abandonment.” ⁵ This also applies to A Pale View of Hills. The novel, Childs summarizes, “is a gentle meditation on memory and sublimated pain, which uses fantasy and displacement to reveal indirectly the distress of a woman who has lost her homeland, her husbands, and her elder daughter.”⁶

In the following, I will first outline the plot of the novel. Then I shall want to concentrate on memory as a means to create identity and to avoid responsibility. I shall also discuss the unreliability of the narrator. As we will see, this unreliability enables the reader to decipher the narrator’s memories. At last I shall try to answer the question how the main protagonist in the novel uses his memory to overcome a loss by transferring her guilt onto an imagenary character.

2. The Plot of the Novel

The novel opens with Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman and the first-person narrator, receiving a visit by her second daughter Niki at her country house in Southern England. When we first meet Etsuko, her mind is occupied with the compromise she has reached with her second husband, Sheringham, over the naming of their daughter:

Niki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name, and I - perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past - insisted on an English one. He finally agreed to Niki, thinking it had some vague echo of the East about it.⁷ (9)

As we learn, Etsuko does not want to be reminded of the past and the reason for this is given shortly afterwards: Her elder daughter has committed suicide by hanging herself in her rented room in Manchester.

The death of Keiko is at the same time the cause for Niki’s five-days spring visit. This visit functions as the frame story for Etsuko’s memories and is set in the early 1980s. Etsuko’s memories go back to one summer in post-war Japan before she has come to England some two decades earlier. “I was thinking about someone I knew once. A woman I knew once [...] when I was living in Nagasaki. [...] A long time ago.” (10) In those flashbacks, Etsuko’s narrative focuses on two aspects that have taken place in the early 1950s in a suburb of Nagasaki: the visit of her father-in-law Seiji Ogata, known as Ogata-San, and her relationship to Sachiko and Mariko.

From her recollection of Ogata San’s visit, the reader hears that Etsuko’s marriage to her husband Jiro is unhappy. He is an electronics worker and only interested in his career. More significant however, is her story about Sachiko and her ten-year old daughter Mariko. Etsuko admits that she “never knew Sachiko well. In fact [their] friendship was no more than a matter of some several weeks one summer many years ago.” (11) Still, Etsuko and Sachiko “were to become friends that summer and for a short time at least [Etsuko] was to be admitted into her confidence.” (13) When Etsuko first meets Sachiko and Mariko, she is in her third or fourth month of pregnancy. Sachiko is a woman in her thirties. She has a boyfriend named Frank, an American soldier, with whom she plans to go to America. She is a very neglectful mother and not interested in her daughter whatsoever, even though she continually insists that her “daughter comes first” (86). Her abuse of Mariko takes many forms: She leaves her unattended, even in a period of mysterious child murders, she strikes her, and she entrusts her daughter to Etsuko, a woman she then barely knows: “If you have nothing else to concern you with, Etsuko [...] then perhaps you’d care to look after my daughter for the day. I’ll be back sometime in the afternoon.” (15) And rather provocative, she adds: “I’m sure you’ll make a splendid mother.” (15)

Sachiko justifies herself by saying that “Mariko should be capable of being left alone on her own by now.” (73) However, the child is “in a somewhat difficult mood [...] these days” (73) and is not able to cope with the situation at all. Mariko does not behave; she is rude to customers of Mrs Fujiwara’s noodle shop; she avoids other children as they are mean to her cats and even has “nasty little fight[s]“ with them and is “playing truant” (14). Despite all that, Sachiko is only concerend with herself as can be seen in a scene in which Mariko is missing and Sachiko inquires whether she is with Etsuko. Etsuko, highly alarmed, offers her help and both women go out to look for Mariko. As it turns out, Sachiko is more interested in telling Etsuko about her plan of leaving Japan than in finding her lost daughter: “In fact, Etsuko, I really came round because I wanted to tell you some news. You see, it’s all been settled at last. We’re leaving for America within the next few days.” (37) It is Etsuko who reminds her that they “can talk later” (38) and “perhaps [...] should find [her] daughter first” (37). Her saying that “it’s being a mother that makes life truly worthwhile” (112) sounds utterly absurd. It is not her daughter she cares about, it is herself. The reason why she wants to go to America is not, as she claims, that “Mariko would be happier there [as] America is a far better place for a young woman to grow up” (170), but rather to fulfill her own dream she is having since her childhood: “When I was young, I used to dream I’d go to America one day, that I’d go there and become a film actress.” (109)

[....]

1 Dunn; Adam: Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro: „Kazuo Ishiguro remembers when“ - 27.10.2000
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/10/27/kazuo.ishiguro/

2 See Gymnich. In: Erll, Gymnich, Nünning (2003): p.37.

3 See Birke. In: Erll, Gymnich, Nünning (2003): p.143.

4 See Birke. In: Erll, Gymnich, Nünning (2003): p.145.

5 Childs (2005): p.123.

6 Childs (2005): p.123.

7 Ishiguro, Kazuo. „A Pale View of Hills.“ London: Faber and Faber, 1982. All further notes will be given parenthetically within the text and will refer to this edition